Resistance is Futile

I am, yet again, trying to find appropriate, affordable means to visit my janma bhoomi, Baroda. I crawl around the internet, trying on various fares, routes, seating arrangements, and durations. Ever since Russia barged into Ukraine, gas prices and fares have sky-rocketed: almost 50% higher! Definitely highway robbery, methinks. 

Appropriately enough, I am on the latest season of Star Trek, something I have blogged about several times. This one is called Picard. I relate to the protagonist's need to escape his janma bhoomi, his scrounging around to find adequate means of travel, and his constant yearning to return to the land of his birth.  The overarching theme of this series seems to be the importance of  overcoming the human fear of technology and incorporating it in the human world so both, organic and "synthetic" life forms can co-exist peacefully and in a manner beneficial to both. Inevitably, this includes many references and plot strains that revolve around the Borg, the terrible monsters from earlier Star Trek seasons, to whom we owe the phrase, "Resistance is futile!" The Borg tend to assimilate organic species and subsume their natural bodies by implanting machinery in their bodies, so the organic self is almost completely lost and the being becomes part of a hive, with a shared consciousness.

I think of our Borg-like world with Fit Bits, smart phones, Zoom, and WhatsApp. Who can imagine or manage life without them? I just made a colleague download WhatsApp that the team may communicate more effectively, rather than relying on primitive methods, like email. Many of our team wish that we would just have a face-to-face meeting and be done with it. However, in COVID times, that is not always possible, safe, or recommended. 

Back to traveling, in a time when I do not feel safe about visiting the inside of grocery stores, the tickets I seek are ones that promise more space between me and my fellow travelers, than the much cheaper ones I used before the pandemic. These tickets used to cost twice as much; now they cost five times as much as the ones I used earlier! Moreover, I need more comfort and hand-holding this time since I will be alone on this daunting journey to and from Baroda. My severely reduced immunity is one of the most chilling factors that require me to seek out appropriately spaced out seats.

Unlike Picard, who is one of my favorite characters, I hate traveling and would be very happy ensconced in my chosen home with the cats. I hate take-offs and landings, and I feel unanchored and claustrophobic when I think or how much removed I am from the ground. Strange airports do not offer any solace to people like me; I feel as though I hover over a worm hole of sorts and that I will be catapulted into another world, another aircraft, another time, that my feet do not touch terra firma. 

However, sooner or later, one must rejoin the rest of the active civilizations, teeming with movement, demanding movement from perfectly content still bodies.  I drive every week day, spend over 8 hours a day at work, and talk to others of my species. Yet I yearn towards my home and cats, where the only traveling I do is through the TV screen. When I try to make rather limp excuses for staying home, I get the same undeniable truth as a refrain from everyone: "You are fine! You must come!

Let me return to my creeping and crawling in search of a better fare, a better seat, a better duration for the journey I must make.

Like the Borg say, Resistance is Futile. 

Non-days and Fairy Tales

The rains began early, started as tentative pre-dawn dripping and before a few minutes had ticked, the rains pelted, the skies lit up, all kinds of cosmic drama unleashed on my sleeping town. I have been sick since then. I can't seem to get my wellness scales quite properly balanced, and the daily thunderstorms do not help. So today, I am taking the day off from the grading, from the cleaning, from the cooking, and I am giving in to the pain, the exhaustion, the sofa, and the insistence of the cat for my lap.

And to the Doctor.

Of course, today, the sun beats down and the skies are blue. It feels like a gift to look out of the window and my little back door. I make sure that the blue skies get great, grateful smiles even as I tumble through the time vortex with the TARDIS and battle the Dalek.

Years ago, a student had suggested that I watch at least one season of Dr.Who, and thankfully, I heeded the suggestion. This was a good thing because now that I have run out of Star Trek episodes the library owns, I need some more fairy tales to heal me when I feel any of a thousand ills my flesh is heir to. Yes, I could use Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and a myriad other sites that will feed me endless, current episodes from any show, but I do not have the skill or the wherewithal to learn it when my shoulders and knees are doing their melting down thing they do when they protest, I am not quite sure what. In fact, I do not have the wherewithal to do some basic dusting and laundry.

I had always said that I would write if I had two minutes to rub together. But of late, my stories break my heart. The joy of creating characters and killing them off, or marrying them off, or sending them off, or receiving them back home, seems to have dimmed. Today, I fear that my fingers might melt if I began writing, so this blog goes out as a challenge to that inevitable melting.

Today, I fear I have morphed into Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.

Today, I fear that I have been reading too many fairy tales.

Today, I wish for more time to read more fairy tales.

The irresistible thing about fairy tales is precisely that they are NOT escapist stories: "I am not running away from things, I am running to them before they flare and fade for all time," the Doctor claims. How can anyone resist such an Odyssey, especially when one may leave behind one's ornery, grumpy, disagreeable body? Today, I use the body of a 900 year old young man with two hearts to travel through infinite time and space, while my singular human heart jumps with worry that I might not be able to travel a few hundred miles to my child's graduation or visit my birthplace for years. These fairy tales give me hope that in a few days or hours, my melting, aching joints will ease and begin working; I will travel wherever and whenever I wish. After all, everything does end in happily ever after!

The cats' Buddha-like sleep faces bespeak of similar cat-tales. However, the cats are wiser than their dormant forms suggest. Even though the skies have been blue all day long, they are now crowded with mountains of black, belying any existence of the gold the sun had spilled everywhere a few minutes ago. I had wondered why the cats had chosen to nap indoors today; now I know! The doctor is right: things are never what they appear.

Once the parallax is adjusted, though, it all ends quite happily, all things considered. So one might say that today is a non-day, a day I invest in adjusting perception to balance parallax.

Tech-Faced

Facebook just pointed out the many advantages of reading literary fiction; of course, I had to share that on my wall; that is so me! Of late, when I have a few minutes between sets of ungraded papers, waiting for a call back from the pharmacy, or just trying to unwind after a whirlwind day, I find myself scouring Facebook.

Now there is nothing extraordinary or new about this. I would not exaggerate if I claimed that this behaviour is quite common for the 21st century homosapien. It is a sign of the times that I split the people I know into two main group, those on Facebook and those who resist. Since I belong most definitely to the former, I despair of ways of keeping in touch with the latter. Surely, I am not expected to do something primitive like actually making a voice call? My students would shudder at the very idea. After all, even if one were to dial the number (is that phrase obsolete?), what would one say? Every time I do make a voice call, I am aware of an underlying wish that the person I am calling would not pick up, that I could just leave a succinct message and hang up to end the awkward experience. I am also aware that, like the rest of my Gujarati family, I tend to speak louder when I talk on the phone, the logic involving a physics formula about the complex relationship between the volume of the voice and the distance it has to travel. The end of such a call, inevitably, is accompanied with a distinct awareness of the needlessly high tones that one has to own up to.

No. Let us connect on Facebook instead. Or perhaps text. Surely, you have downloaded WhatsApp on your smart phone? Why involve something as personal as, as strange as disembodied voices?

One of the TV channels I watch proclaims Vasudhaiva Kutumbekam (world is one family) as its tag line. I cannot think of a better descriptor for the globalization that I take for granted, an idea that my younger self could only sigh over while watching Star Trek. My child posts pictures from her phone onto my Facebook wall so that now, I know what the EU headquarters in Brussels look like; my cousin FaceTimes with us from Vadodara so that his toddler can show us his new toys; my Google+ holds our clan's photo albums; my Geni informs me when a birthday nears; I can even borrow books from my county library on my Kindle while waiting for my flight connection at Heathrow.

A few of my friends are disappointed at the direction the world seems to be taking; the figure of Darth Vader seems to personify this fear of losing our humanity to technology, very much like the Minotaur expressed the ancient Greek's fear of losing humanity to the beast within. This is a valid fear, of course. However, if being part machine helps us become more human, does it not make the machine more human than the other way around? Take pacemakers or dialysis machines, for example. Would we be willing to go back to a world without those? I remember typing up papers with carbon sheets ensconced in between, which copious gallons of whiteout could not salvage. If given a choice, I would never go back to those days! Many fictional re-creations of post apocalyptic stories explore what the world would be like without the present day's communication channels. My blood runs cold with fright when I read those.

I cannot imagine that devices that help us communicate in varied ways can be essentially malignant. Certainly, some people will misbehave and misuse these devices; however, do we let the fear of misbehaviour guide us? Is it even in our nature to do that? History is evidence that we have always looked for ways to make the world smaller; thanks to Facebook and smart phones, this world is at our fingertips, and it is up to us to expand it exponentially until it becomes real or to contract it to a thumbnail.

I am grateful that I live in the same age as these devices. Worlds I had thought were lost to me have been returned a thousand fold; I am thinking of ancient legends, the dance form I was trained in (Kathak), my favorite painting genre (Indian miniatures), Hindi songs and films from the 1960's, and garbas or Gujarati folk dance music so ancient that most lyrics are derived from oral history. One can enjoy the Gregorian Chant and Sanskrit shlokas with the same crystal clarity as though they were being spoken in one's presence. I can find ancient trade routes or recreate a festival day of an Indonesian wife without much trouble. I wouldn't be able to spark my students' interest in Greek Mythology or Folk Tales if I couldn't bring up Google Images of Echidna or Baba Yaga.

I could go on, of course. I do so love the times I inhabit, may the Luddite gods forgive me! I fail to imagine what the next half decade will bring, but I am very excited about it.

Now my patient reader must excuse me. I must go back to preparing a collection of my favorite garbas on my flash drive so that I can plug it into my car and listen to these ancient lyrics on my way to work. After that, I must find a kidney friendly recipe from websites recommended by my online support group, transfer money between accounts, and order a birthday gift from Amazon; I must flex my fingers and send them racing across the keyboard, and the world I manage. In between these chores, if you are on Facebook, I might wander in and say a quick Hey.



 

Lumos: of MOOCs and LMS

I must confess to a largely cursory interest in the future of Higher Education until this week. I know, I know, patient reader; this is the business that keeps me in cat food and samosas: how could I not be more aware, involved, curious? However, there you have it: I have been apologetically, blatantly incurious. I've had plenty of excuses for this, of course, and all of them quite, quite valid, all tinged with only an obligatory tinge of apology.

All that changed this week, when I attended a conference (Cengage & SXSWedu) that shook me awake and forced me to turn my head and look out of the window. The landscape has completely changed, and what is more, is rushing fast, faster than my eye can keep up. It is a veritable stampede!

Before I address the changes, I want to first validate what remains reassuringly unchanged. All reliance on a keyboard is not always the best thing, yet. Everywhere I looked, attendees were plugged in (for lack of a better epithet): they all (with probably less than 1% exceptions) had ipads or tablets which were busily buzzing along, talking to them and their phones, and a variety of other devices. I cannot express the strangeness I felt as I whipped out a pen and notebook to take notes during sessions. But then I realized that no matter how much I type, and how fast I've learned to type, I still write much, much faster, with greater coherence, since my hand doesn't require me to press the shift button, or do anything extra when I want to change languages or use symbols instead of words. A part of me feels reassured to know that I am still the most efficient and fastest note taker for me.

At the same time, however, the material I was taking notes on has widened my eyes, popped my inner ears, and lighted up unexplored corridors in my brain! Ah brave new world! I learned of the very real impact of MOOCs, of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Multi dimensional interface, and Analytical feedback (like the recommendations one sees when shopping on Amazon, for instance).  It was really like an instructor's dream: we were treated to lunch as publishers and authors of textbooks asked what our perfect texts would look like! I know I am not alone in feeling the isolation behind the desk, and I have often wondered about the value of what I do. I have often dreamed of "if only" and "by now, we should be able to" scenarios; well, those scenarios are already here, it would seem.

One of the sessions used the trope of Peter Pan's shadow to point out the impact that Web 2.0 has on our sense of self. This has resonated to me and at last, at last, I have a clearer understanding of why we all prefer Facebook to PDF's of texts (a pointless thing, if you ask me; if students don't read the hard copy, why would they read the PDF of the same?). However, now, I understand why students (and, I confess, the instructor in me) are so attracted to our LMS (which is neither the best, nor the worst) and I plan to exploit it to its fullest capacity.

I do not, of course, mean to indicate that I shall be completely reliant on my LMS: if it goes away, I will not be lost, since I have found  many compasses. I learned how to use completely free resources if one has no LMS. In fact, one of the fascinating lounges I visited was the Google lounge, which offered a wonderful respite from the crowded sessions, provided time and space to explore how to use free resources to teach and learn, even try out the new technology to be released later on this year.

I have heard a great deal of doom saying when conversations meander towards the future of Higher Education, especially during the last year, with its stampede of MOOCs. The sessions I attended, however, have reassured me: learning is not becoming obsolete and the value of the educator in this maelstrom of changing technologies, is unshakable and central. I have a clearer idea of what I'd like my absolute dream job to be (though this job, of course doesn't exist yet, I don't think).

I have spent the greater part of this weekend trying to catch up on the grading that has loomed large in my absence. But today, I don't resent it like I used to. My attitude towards the endless grading (the lot of every writing instructor) has been similar to the unnamed Maiden's attitude to her endless spinning in Grimms' "Mother Holle." However, like the Maiden, I have glimpsed at the alternate world beneath the well, a world that coexists with mine, where meaningless, repetitive chores have cosmic impact and all work is meaningful, relevant, and rewarded.

To Explore Brave New Worlds: A Boston Weekend

Vacationing is most effective when it doesn't just offer an escape from the debilitating regularity of a routine, but goes beyond to open a window to a completely new reality. I do not mean an alternate reality, like a visit to the land of What If; I mean a world that has gone on inexorably, crossing unimaginable horizons and thresholds, one that redefines our very reality. My trip to Boston did that for me: it showed me a brave new world, so that even the railroad tracks in the middle of the street looked incredibly cool instead of impractical.

I spent a couple of days getting to know all about Paul Revere and Beacon Hill. But then, across one of the bridges, lay the cobblestones to another time, more Star Trek than Revolution. I walked past places that were as exotic and improbable as any that the Starship Enterprise could boast knowing; I walked past 100 Technology Square, with MIT buildings owning all horizons all around; Microsoft proclaimed its newest generations on a live billboard in Kendall Square; next to a crepe place, a large window advertised the map of the human genome; across the street were the MIT center for cancer research and center for brain research. Really, I felt like I was perched on the edge of human civilisation. My worries about the cats' feeding times, my child's dorm bill, and the price of gas seemed embarrassingly trivial, even outdated.

There are some cities that just call to me to own them, invite me to explore their labyrinthine alleys, discover new worlds in their roofs and skylines, and through it all, a river runs, lending a touch of the archetypal, cities that, for lack of a better descriptor, simply sing to me. I can barely resist this song, and the fusion that Boston is, with its stately architectures that dream of London and Florence, with the red vein of Freedom Trail that runs through it, with the little ducks all in a row, it hums with a heady aria. People who know me often mistake me for a history buff, but I can barely aspire to be one. My personal touchstones for European history are based on the most unreliable of all historical sources, Shakespeare, Malory, Gildas! So it would be safer to say that I am passionate about and attracted to the drama of human experience that history promises, rather than to a commitment to keeping a chronological string of events untangled in my head. So it was with Boston, which spoke hauntingly of Paule Revere's lanterns, and in the same breath, claimed Leonard Nimoy as its own.

In Cambridge, we passed by this really beautiful local college. There was snow on the ground and the sky looked like a desert with tree skeletons scratching at its cold, grey expanse. But students skipped and strode purposefully and all but danced the extremely serious nature of their excitement at returning to their Alma Mater after a winter fortnight away. This local institution proclaimed its universal appeal with an insignia that summed up its mission in a word, Veritas. Here, as I witnessed the active pursuit of ancient truths, I inhaled and knew the thin, cold air that stratifies the very pinnacle of the highest achievements of our species, from the mundane concerns of lay visitors, awarded a glimpse of the busyness of the business of being human.

I return humbled and enriched to my blue-gold skies and lands of eternal summer, back to my trivial routine. My hope is that this entry shall remind me of this sweet air that I had once breathed, sauntering around in one of the Coops, buying a fridge magnet in exchange of a promise to these cobblestones of many future tramplings.

 

The Journey Home: To Seek Out New Worlds

Ah the optimism of desperation! Contrary to my last post, I still await; I have not reached home yet, and a myriad of oceans lie between my diminishing baggage and that house across the street I remember as mine in a previous life. If I sat down to catalogue all I have lost since almost a year ago, when my wish for a new kitchen began to get granted, I would be left with even less, not even my desperate optimism! Instead of counting losses (which are inevitable, no matter what journey one reads about), it might be more meaningful to acknowledge the lighthouses, perched on unreachable shores, on unassailable heights, that light up many darknesses.

One such lighthouse is celebrating its half century today, the television series, Star Trek. I know I have blogged about this previously. But today, I have been thinking about the theme of loss as a necessity in the discovery process.

Of late, and wherefore, (unlike the Prince) I do know, I have lost all my mirth, and my stories reflect this: I have been purging my darkness in stories the hue and, often, the texture of tar. My protagonists die to express losses I cannot express, catalogue, or even acknowledge. My lovers are left bereft, my houses haunt and devour, and my dusty-shady lands deny and bury. There remains an ageless, timeless part of me that questions all this dark matter splattered over my stories: am I (shudder, shudder) wallowing? Being lost myself, should I not, rather, write of self, home, love found? To what end all these tantrum tales?

However, my Trekkie self has quick answers: Dark Matter is dark not with absence but with a teeming presence, and that too, of a cosmic make up, the design and music of the Universe! I think of the various losses in I see in Star Trek series, and none of those losses is permanent, not even the deaths! Sometimes, what the crew thinks of as dead is merely their failure to recognize what is very much alive. Sometimes, they find the definition of Life in a Borg graveyard. The very basic, underlying premise of the Star Trek universe is that nothing gets destroyed; matter is forever changing, so what is lost still surrounds the crew and impels them onwards to whatever their mission is, diplomacy, exploration, holding peace at the edge of a stable worm hole, or the most archetypal of all, the way home.

If the expanse outside the window is not earth-bound, then why seek the achingly familiar? Perhaps, then, the losses are to be re-catalogued among the changed, and the mission, then, is to recognize, not reach. What is to be recognized, though? I cannot imagine the crew of the Enterprise or the Voyager without their ship anymore than I can imagine Deep Space 9 without its merchants, rogues, peace-keepers and idealists.

I went to my newly built, not-burnt house today, and it did not recognize me. My voice sounded hollow and my footsteps felt intrusive. The walls and their outlets watched me cautiously as I moved through the rooms, switching on unfamiliar lights, testing footholds and banisters. As in a dream or palimpsest, I remember the forgotten ease with which I had bounded among these spaces, unthinking in my familiarity of their exact shape and texture,  but these are not those walls or floors, even though they too, with me, occupy the same space.

For all captains of the star-ships of Star Trek, some of the most tenuous grounds are the ones on which they stand to encounter first contact with new species. My hope, after all these seasons of loss, is for the wisdom, the willingness, the gumption to begin a meaningful, mutually profitable dialogue that both, the Ferengis and the Vulcans would be proud of.